I get it! (the long tail)

The whole time I’ve been reading through The Long Tail, I’ve been trying to grasp how it applies to content production (or more specifically, my blogs).

There’s the obvious route of having large numbers of niche blogs (Weblogs Inc), but while for some reason that system has worked (probably because the hits support the tail), it’s pretty hard to figure a way that each niche blog couldsupport itself all the way down the tail.

Last night, around 2:30am, I figured it out: the long tail forms with blog archives. Once produced (and blogs, unlike most mainstream media, have really accessible archives), these archives cost literally nothing to keep around (reduce cost to zero), and their subject matter often subdivides into whatever extent of the long tail you’d like.

I’ve got no numbers to graph, but my guess is that if you listed every blog post from my blogs and laid them out in terms of how many visits each permalink gets, you’d end up with a rough equivalent of the long tail.

Huzzah!

And as an added bonus, you get to enjoy this YouTube video now: